rapturerebornmmorpgfandomcom-20200216-history
Part 40
Sitemap '--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- -' More interesting items/ideas for a Bioshock Rapture MMORPG '--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- -' Part 40 --- --- --- --- --- "Erased all documentation of him/her" - allegedly done for Sofia Lamb and 'Johnny Topside' : Something Ryan allegedly did to various 'enemies' who he made disappear (exiled, not murdered like Lamb or Fontaine would have done ). Criminals which warranted permanent exile, and who had 'fellow traveler' followers - he would have them 'removed' in this way to minimize the damage they could still cause to the City (dead martyrs can have more effect than live fomentors of rebellion/disruption). Another one of those things so easily said for 'The Plot', but not that easy to do for real -- even in a Police State ... even one well beyond whatever Rapture allegedly turned into by the time of BS1. Ryan might have threatened/ordered the remaining newspapers to no longer mention the particular "Persona Non Exista" and clean whatever 'open' government records there were, and seize any/all assets (So why did Dionysus Park keep operating?? -- guess Ryan didnt do that -- maybe it was put under 'new' management so as to not cause any bigger stink ... Stanley Poole in charge (his destruction of Dionysus seemed more petty coverup over Eleanor rather than some kind of 'orders' from Ryan to do the place in ... ). But could/did Ryan order all old copies of newspapers collected, same for all Sofia Lambs books?? (we still saw these all over - but maybe she had more of her bizarre muttering printed up?) We still see her name on her psychiatric 'clinic' and posters on the walls advertising her services, so it was not quite as thoroughly despotic as the devs/designers tried to portray it. Perhaps for Ryan, it was better to have her flakey ideas visible for people in Rapture, to decide for themselves. With Ryan allegedly dead and Sofia Lamb emerged - was it actually a ploy to bring the poison out into the open?? Why would the still living Ryan wait so many years (though the rest of Rapture effectively did close itself off from Sofia Lamb's little kingdom -- Ryans doing ???) Perhaps it was simpler to let them kill themselves off, following Sofia's insane ideas and policies (and serve as a object lesson by its self-implosion). --- --- --- --- --- --- Plethora of opportunities for the imaginitive : Boss Splicer who only speaks in quotes from Shakespeare (calls himself Barney the First). It should be pretty easy to come up with enough different 'quotations' as reactions to the usual game situations. Some Splicers seem to find him impressive enough (he has followers) or maybe he is just clever and runs things in a smart way to keep things together. May do the Hamlet soliloquy with a skull some Splicers claim is Andrew Ryan's. How exactly the Player would infiltrate a group of Splicers (who are not trustful folk) in order to witness this might be problematic. --- --- None of the upscale apartments we saw lokked like this : http://deejay-alien.deviantart.com/art/ART-DECO-INTERIOR-212863435 --- --- --- Car Parks/Parking Lots (or would that be Sub Parks ?? ) : One of the problems with Submarines in Rapture is that they require alot more infrastructure/care than your Surface World Car. If it fails, you are crushed/drowned to death in seconds instead of inconveniently being stuck at the side of thge road. So they have to be built much more robustly/fail-proof (besides likely weighing 7+ times more than your ordinary car). The Parking spots likewise are more complicated as they need to transition between that high water pressure of Rapture's depth to the ordinary sea-level pressure you walk out into in Rapture's interior. So, expense suddenly goes way up, even for mechanically 'advanced' Rapture, fewer people will own 'sub' cars -- even less than they do in a city like New York, where even in that era cars were less common. Public transit was much more commonly used - it had to be. You would have to be fairly rich to have a private 'garage' (subbay) on your house/apartment. Upscale Apartment complexes may have a 'parking structure' where the machinery/safeguards required could be shared, thus lowering expenses somewhat. Still this would be many times more costly than we have up here for cars. Maintenence/repair for the 'Subs' also would add substantial expenses for their owners. A complementary problem would be the need for adaquate parking garages at all the destinations people would want to get to. Places frequented by the rich would not be a problem, but for everywhere else. Shared complexes like shopping malls would likely have some parking facilities for Sub using customers. WIthout sufficent destinations, the sub's utility becomes fairly low. --- --- --- After Delta/Eleanor/Sofia left, who was left still in Rapture ? : Who would have been left to serve to organize everyone/anyone who was left? --- Persephone (or a chunk of it) fell into the Abyss - taking the warden with it? or was he already dead?? Actually that explosion wasnt really enough (the way the buildings in Rapture are built like German WW2 Submarine Pens), A section there had its environment 'compromised' (it was flooded). The automatic bulkheads would have closed to minimize the area effected. --- Lamb killed alot of her own Splicers (and 'family') in places like Sirens Alley by drowning them and by flooding sections, which probably fragmented groups (if her betraying them hadnt already). --- Nothing said that Lamb had any large part of the City under her control (the maps only show a small South part of the City). --- Fontaine probably had no time to 'adjust' the Vita-Chambers for himself (but you cant have logic get in the way of a plot...) On the other hand Jack chopped Fontaine into fishbait after the Lil Sisters vampired all his ADAM. --- Fontaine/Atlas was killed pretty soon after he got Ryan's genetic control key (if that wasnt just a ploy) so probably didnt have alot of time to do much before Jack killed him (and Fontaine likely would NOT have given power/control to anyone else - if there many left). --- Father Wales was dead (his brother too if you bother to kill him - but then he was a Pimp and he may also not have escapes Sofia's Flood anyway) but someone from his group may have had enough influence to hold some of it together. --- Whats-her-face in Paupers Drop might still be there - if you didnt kill her. Grace probably would only have a small pocket, she didnt have the technical control of anything larger than the little fiefdom Lamb had allowed her and probably it wasnt self-sustainable anyway. --- Some less-spliced people somewhere had been producing food for Lamb, and that organization probably survived. --- Some of Ryans minions might have held out if they had control of some of Ryans Splicers (who also might have retained Fontaines Futuristics (Ryan's company now) as a source of Adam/Eve). --- Ryan not actually being dead (an obvious REAL twist they missed out on). Ryan himself may have fooled Fontaine when he 'died' and used a Vita-Chamber to come back out of sight (and then was hiding in his secret Grotto... By 1968 Ryan still would only be about 60 years old and the Vita-Chambers are supposed to do some revitalization and who knows what else...) This would change alot of things. But where was he up past BS2 times? --- Sander Cohen potentially could still be alive (again if you didnt kill him or possibly Ryan allowed his Vita Chamber to continue to work after you did 'off' him - and I saw him bak at least once after I allegedly killed him...) --- Delta was last seen floating down towards Rapture half turned to hamburger by the explosion, but Big Daddies have to have major capacities for self-repair... --- Eleanor potentially could come back (and possibly reconstitute Delta again if needed) --- Ditto Tenenbaum after Minerva's Den (with a 'cure') --- Gil Alexander might be alive if Delta left him so. Might he overcome his insanity, might he extend further control now that Sofia wasnt there any more to block/contain him ???? Maybe he just headed for Japan to menace Tokyo or somesuch. As with any real city there is a huge hidden/out-of-sight part of it required to support the visible. Somewhere there was all the infrastructure that kept all the people alive (Splicers dont stay alive by eating concrete/rust/water-logged wallpaper, and we saw many with enough free time to wander about (before we slaughtered them). We only ever saw a teeny-tiny bit of Rapture. The different factions would probably congregate around/control the available resources (ie- Fontaines remaining minions would probably still be around Neptunes Bounty with its the source of fish). And with less Adam available in Rapture, the levels of insanity might be somewhat reduced. --- --- --- --- Another Interactive Roleplaying/Flashback experience -- Little Sister Training : Go thru the Little Sisters process of being converted, conditioned and trained and then wandering the streets of Rapture finding 'Angels' with 'Daddy' tagging along. Leaderboard for blood-sucking and ADAM excreting (errr, Angels Processing....). Hmm, 'Achievements'.... What kind of HUD would a Little Sister have (that could be very interesting to see). Little Sisters 'inventory' and 'toy' selections. Angels 'kissed', lollipops earned, etc... Experience the different situations/environments (and their own historic set of Flashbacks like 'mean' Papa Suchong getting a merrygoround ride on Daddy's drill thingee) -- between those in Fontaines Little Sisters Orphanages (before and after City takeover), Lamb's Crazy Doll-House (before and after Sofia Lamb's "removal"), Post Civil War Factions keeping their own bunches of LS (will have to come up with one of those quaint terms for a 'group' of Little Sisters - probably should have a contest...), Rogue Big Sisters and Big Daddies having 'their own' stashed in isolated areas, and how New Rapture maintains a number they've managed to capture (Tenenbaum is researching the bio-chemical effects to find improvements for 'The Cure' and those Little Sisters dont go out collecting any more). We have all those sound/monologue Assets already existing ( http://bioshock.wikia.com/wiki/Little_Sister/Quotes#MultiPlayer_Quotes ) to be able to make use of (and no doubt you could slice-n-dice phrases/words out of them for useful recombinations). Voice acting fot new ones - they dont really talk in long monologues. - The Above section brought to mind, that amongst all the other Player Creation avenues there should likewise be a HUD/interface creation mechanism which can be employed in the game for at-minimum custom 'skins', but then also for things like Mini-Games and Roleplaying specializations. Players would no doubt also produce improvements to the standard interfaces (again, it is tapping into Player know-how/skill/imagination that dwarfs all the game companies' put together, as well as real user-experience to incrementally compose better ones for Players). That brings up another idea : that 'Mini-Games' in the MMORPG have the main games entire set of 3D engine/assets to make use of (for those that dont target the handheld 'Offline' playing mode and by the time this game would be done the average smartphones/tablets will have alot more 3D capabilities). The 'build-on-the-fly' Holodeck-like mechanism and easy-to-use tools would streamline Mini-game production and leave more time for the Player creator to employ their imagination to craft the 'game' rather than to have to Fight a poorly-made/limited/bothersome tool mechanism. Custom 'game mechanics' controlling these Mini-Games is also one of the modular elements of the MMORPG system. --- --- --- Quantify support population for 'Elites' - the 'Pyramid' : Scientists, Artists, Rich People, Businessmen ... Remember that anyone who directly supports an 'Elite' with products and services themselves have to be supported by someone else, who has in turn to support themselves/be supported as well. Even with alot of clever automation and mechanisms, Raptures environment has many complicating factors that detract from surface level efficiencies. Some real-world mechanisms like mass production cannot often be done because with a population of 20k-40k, there simply are not enough customers for it to apply. It is likely that fishing/farming would require upto a fifth of the population to keep Rapture consistantly fed. With the major disruptions caused by Atlas and his murderous army of Splicers, it might be more understandable how much effort Ryan had to expend to keep his City from dying during the Civil War, and how difficult things might then have become after Ryan was gone. The remaining population (including Splicers) would likely spend a great deal of their time just finding enough to eat (or trading with those who were good at it or access). Fortunately, being 'Spliced' is a matter of degree, and many of the more insane ones would soon die of starvation or eventually be killed in self-preservation by the more 'sane' residents (Splicer and non-Splicer). --- --- --- Why Rapture didnt look like Star Wars/Trek/Blade Runner : In Rapture, there was an uneveness in the application of new technologies, as it was applied for somethings and others were left in their base post-WW2 era level (those developments also took place AFTER much of the City and objects were built/manufactured in existing styles for example). Aesthetics in style likewise doesnt change even though the function of the object may be advanced (thus an Art Deco Com-put-er terminal or the Gentic Reserach camera which looks largely like a normal camera). Styles developed over the 6 decades since did not exist yet (and themselves are fairly sophisticated idea developments) --- inventing such things are truly hard -- you cannot in Real Life (in Rapture's sci-fi context) simply do what the developers of Bioshock did and simply mass duplicate/cut-n-paste/copy EXISTING ideas/styles/themes/materials/media, which many better brains came up with long ago. --- --- --- Strange experiments were done in Rapture (Often by people who hadnt a clue what they were doing.) : One case was 'Lord Morris', the cat, allegedly fed Brain Boost (sometime during the Lamb era) and developed super human intelligence. Not unusual to believe in Rapture, where the Impossible was Possible (Ryans mottos did get absorbed into people's heads..). A Splicer Faction with a distinct 'cat' motif did exist with more than a few followers. The unfortunate demise of 'Lord Morris' spelt its ending. In actuality it was a clever Splicer manipulating gullible people (clever enough to provide them with survival - which is no small accomplishment in post-Ryan Rapture, and which led many to follow ANYTHING that provided some opder and more than a hand-to-mouth subsistance). Where do I keep coming up with stuff like this? Well, Rapture is pretty broad in its possibilities and just about anything in your life or our modern world can be made to fit into it. And thats the kind of environment where people's imaginations can be employed, instead of a game rigidly defined by 'Lore' and 'Canon' of its genre. --- --- --- McDonagh's Cutout Character : Only way for Civil War to end is to kill Ryan ??? How about kill the murderous destructive rebel Atlas ? Yes, turn Rapture over to the insane Splicers, that will make things all better. I find this one of the stupidest elements in the game, where it is all too obvious that the developers lacked any real imagination and came up with this lame fabrication (were they running out of time or just havent a clue of reality??) But then Rapture HAS to Fail, or there isnt the handy environment for a shoot-em-up blast-fest game with a bunch of cutout bad guys and simplistic 'of course' side taking. Ryan is BAAAAAD - making it easy to listen to (and be led by the nose by) Atlas until the wonderful 'Twist' can be sprung. So McDonagh is just a pawn with NO character, a turncoat with no loyalty (or even sense) mouthing lazy developer's very convenient words to add to the heaps of BS. The Novel (not the game) explains how he wants to get his family out to save them from the nightmare Fontaine has caused. But he picks the wrong side and abandons the dream and decides to cut-and-run (and abandon a city he did alot to help build AND murder Ryan who should be the best bet for fixing Rapture). A feeble game character who could have had a much better story. (lets have the MMORPG explain what REALLY happened instead of the piecemeal distortion we pick up in a few Accu-VOX recordings.) --- --- Are there any Lawyers in Rapture ? : "No Laws" is just Dev/Designer BS (illogical fabrication to setup Rapture to Fail). A City of 20-40 thousand people without Laws is an impossibility and ludicrous. There would be many disputes and certainly Safety 'Laws' and ordinanvces that would have to be enforced. Disagreements would have to be arbitrated. With Laws come 'Courts' of Law and Judges and 'Advocates' (lawyers). Expecting some part-time handful of people in a 'City Council' to make more than a token few 'decisions' for a whole city is fantasy (as dim as there being no Police or No Laws). So thus there would be lawyers, who no doubt (under Ryan) would not be allowed to become worse-than-useless middlemen, impairing peoples lives and businesses as they exist in our world today. Commercial law requires people to draw up documents and the 'let the buyer beware' atmosphere would have various businessmen protecting their end of most 'deals' with agreement 'on paper' and of an appropriate form. Rapture Failed (rather was CREATED to fail for the plot ) because people like Fontaine and Lamb (actively working against/disrupting the established order and organization) were not checked by any Laws and enforcement powers of a government. They were shown getting away with what is a perverted view of 'individualism' -- where they destroyed other people's achievements to seize power/gains for themselves -- NOT part of any Objectivist's allowed social contract. Ryan wasnt an idiot, he would know real laws would have to exist, but with sufficient checks and balances to give the individual the power to correct most things or have a larger body correct according to the general consensus. Objectivism and Rand's ideas are not anarchy (they might be portrayed so by socialists and conmmunists) as was perpetrated upon Rapture to give an easy excuse for its failure, so we could go around shooting up what was left. When I think about it, this element of the scenario, makes it as much a ludicrous fantasy as Infinite is. --- --- Dionysus Park - Stanley Poole's little shindig, Drowned... : Convenient that the place is such a death-trap. But simplistic storyline is much of what we get in this game (its supposed to be 17+ ... not 5+ age targeted). You'd think they could come up with something a bit less lame (ie - Stanley Poole with the keys to the place doesnt need a stupidly faulty 'ready to fail' system to 'fix' the place as a coverup of his misdoings.) Heh- a massive FIRE (ironicly) under the ocean, corpses burned beyond recognition, etc... They should(could) have thrown in some verbage that Poole thought that Ryan would reward him for "doing in" Lamb's little socialist haven, but then remark that Ryan would NOT be happy with the inadvertant deathcount (besides disrupting the AE route passage). Poole likely was hiding from Ryan more than Sofia Lamb. BTW - I thought the AE was supposed to be long shutdown/bankrupted and superceded by the Metro (Ive explained elsewhere how that could be). The timing is also a bit suspect -- this 'Gala Opening' that is held somewhat late after Lamb became a jailbird?? (or shouldnt there be no general knowledge at all of her being exiled to Persephone?? as is alluded to ). Who is left to talk the rich people into handing over money to support Dionysus. We see advertisements around inconsistant with a place 'just opening'. --- --- --- Observation - In public places all the workings - machinery/exposed pipes/etc would have been hidden : Not talking about where damage has exposed stuff, but things obviously placed to out in the open. In many locations (particularly businesses) all the fans and electric widgets and pipes/conduits would be covered over or closetted away in utility rooms -- NOT left in the open to take a chunk out of some custonmers elbow or be exposed so someone can bonk their head on it, or even just clash with the Decor. Environmental equipment usually isnt left in the open to be meddled/interfered with. Of course the more lower-class the place, the less caring anyone would be (we did go thru some areas like that - the ones with bare concrete walls...). In the Real World equipment got retrofitted to buildings over decades (electrics, phone systems, computers, replacement piping), but Rapture is virtually new, and newly build buildings usually are designed to cluster and hide such things away, and prevent accidental damage to it or whoever might have run into it. The game level developers used such things as decorative objects instead of real decorations, to make various plain walls/ceilings less plain. They had budgeted limited interior spaces to create (Ive shown on the maps many of the extensive 'hidden' areas required to make such a place function), so they had to place such things in view in an attempt to hint at the infrastructure Rapture would have (vague/fake machinery is also easy to produce versus something recognizable) .. The MMORPG would have alot more space, attempt to place things properly, have stuff 'behind the walls' which can be accessed via the objectified terrain system (you can take down the interior walls...) --- --- --- Crate/Box (those weird part leather 'lootable' container things, which didnt fully open) ? : Alot of things do not fit in Crates (and those even smaller Lockboxes). This MMORPG would have Visible objects on ground, on corpses, stuff that actually fits in Crates, lockers, etc. By the possible date of this game happening, the average gaming computer will have more memory/CPU/GPU processing capacities and (quite important) highly likely to have an SSD (solid state disk) to greatly speed up into-memory loads off the filesystem. That will mean a greater capability of displaying many more object simultaneously and appear as you move through the scenery. Ive already said that having many objects remain as low-ish detail caricatures would be OK for this game (to allow it to do what it improves on reasonable target hardware. The more detailed an object gets the harder it is to compose and render it correctly, without player's brains constantly telling them "something about that thing just doesnt look right" .... a distraction). - Those Lockboxes -- a practical 'game' way to remove excess human corpses, which use up alot of rendering resources - each corpse has something like 25 seperately movable sub-parts and lots of multi-textured facets (and would have to interact with the physics system as 'debris'). Anyway, they are about the right size to contain a corpse's crematoria ashes. I have mentioned elsewhere how they come to be exchanged (something about 'Corpse Gnomes' and the possible disposition for 'Little Brothers'...) --- --- --- Fire My Lolli-popgun at the rabid Goodbye-Kitty so I can go out to Play with Daddy.. : Why did Sofia Lamb have to go to all that trouble to kidnap new Little Sisters from the Surface (How many did she also arrange to buy on the Black-Market I wonder?), if there were children still in Rapture ?? Because the remaining sane people were the survivors of 10 year of Chaos and Faction fighting. They banded together and walled themselves off from twisted people like Lamb, and killed the Splicers she sent to try to grab the survivor's children (or anything else they had of value). Many sections of connecting structures were destroyed and flooded to form a barrier against the southern part of Rapture where Lamb's little domain lay, making it much harder for her to attack them. Eventually threats from other factions and decisive defeats forced Lamb to stop attempting to expand. Some say it drove her mad and led to the 'First Utopian' delusions she afflicted on those within her power. --- --- --- Barbarians in the Ruins of Rome : New Rapture's Citizens have memories of what Rapture was and have been through the 'Dark Ages' and chaos. The world did not end and now New Rapture is rising. A new Renaissance to regain Rapture's lost greatness and move forward. That is the idea to inspire the Citizens. It is why the City Center is being restored to have the same look and feel as the grandest places of Old Rapture. The Postman makes his rounds once again.... --- --- --- New Rapture City Food Stockpile : Idea is to encourage Citizens to maintain some amount of food and other necessities in case there is an emergency or unfortunate circumstances. This goes hand-in-hand with diversifying food production so that a failure in one area doesnt take out a significant proportion of production/supply. Expanding the production capacity is also needed as additional Splicers are "Cured" and the City's population expands. Like our modern world, the Citizens have moved from a subsistance economy where they had been dispersed out in the ruins living largely hand-to-mouth (beside some areas of higher organization/capacity). Dependancy on various systems leaves the City vulnurable brittle - a failure impacts a large numbers of people and they cannot simply/quickly revert back to a subsistance life (that was something that took time to develop and a population spread out to find/take advantages of various resources -- not something you do in a few weeks - the time it takes to starve to death). One of the issues for the Citzens to decide (voting) is how much to store Centrally (requiring space and maintenance and security as well as the purchase of supplies -- but with advantage of economy of scale), versus methods to encourage individuals to prepare for themselves (pamphlets are cheap). No doubt there would be missions for the player to take part in this project. --- --- --- Game Engine Use of Generic Textures : Players can have their own 'Residences' and an ability to outfit them in many ways with many different objects. The extra details, if normally seen, would have to be downloaded to Clients that can view those objects. There can be an optimization (particularly useful for lower-end targeted hardware) to simplify and genericise the specific textures called for by individual objects (simplified textures is part of the standard attributes defined for all objects). Of course an Option should be provided for the Player's own Residence (or that of 'friends') to always be fully detailed. The MMORPG would use a streaming download system to get such textures to clients (in a relatively timely fashion) and then store them in a disk data 'dictionary' for reuse. Until the download completed, a generic 'closest-match' texture would be used for display. As gaming moves furter animated texture will become more common, and they will call for a progressive detail method like this. --- --- --- New Rapture's Achievement - a new building with components recovered from several other wrecked ones along with brand new manufactured components and materials, is being placed and connected to the City Center - demonstrating that the Citizens/City can again do what they once did. Player can take part in the work (progress demonstrates the process and steps of how Rapture was originally built). A series of these would be done so that incremental progress is visible and sustainable for the MMORPG's scenario (versus other things that would be one-ofs - unique places where the 'recovery' can really only happen once on the Server World - (ie - Reopening of Fort Frolic or Arcadia) but still could have a long incremental process with many milestones). --- --- --- . . . .